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OPINION:
Of all the countries that covet victory against the All Blacks, the Welsh are the most consumed by their desperation.
Every serious rugby contender harbours a desire to beat the All Blacks – a heightened sense that victory against New Zealand will be defining, possibly even career-changing.
But withthe Welsh, there has long been a hint of this desire being obsessive and far from being empowering or inspirational, it is a restrictive, debilitating force that ties the players in mental knots and has them beaten long before the game is ever played.
The All Blacks pitch up in Cardiff and the Welsh just can't help reminding themselves that they haven't beaten New Zealand since 1953.
There's almost a formula for how things play out when the All Blacks are in Wales. The media trawl through the last 68 years, remembering the close run things, the nearly moments and what might have beens and then haul out a few stars from the past to recount, in agonising detail, where it went wrong and how they would do things differently given their time again.
It's supposed to be cathartic, a road map even for the current team on how to go about actually getting the job done, but it tends only to serve as a reminder of generations of failure while exaggerating the enormity of what it takes to beat the All Blacks.
It's a process which seems to only enhance the standing of the All Blacks in frail Welsh minds.
Wales players ahead of their clash against Argentina earlier this year. Photo / Getty
This inability to see past their last victory in 1953 is similar to that of the England football team who can't stop fixating on 1966 and the last time they won the World Cup.
What's strange is not that Wales have fashioned history into such an ill-fitting suit, but why they feel the need to keep wearing it.
Wales don't burden themselves with history when they play against any other country. In the last two decades they have won the Six Nations six times, four of those titles being secured with Grand Slams.
So too have they beaten, sporadically more than regularly, South Africa and Australia and they made the semifinals of both the 2011 and 2019 World Cups.
This is a nation that has played consistently good rugby for 20 years, won big tests in the most intimidating venues and yet they get one sniff of the All Blacks and go all weak at the knees.
It makes no sense why Wales continue to look back rather than forward when it comes to the All Blacks and why they feel this need to paralyse themselves with the significance they attach to beating them.
Perhaps there is something deeper driving this retrospective perspective and it's linked to much more than rugby.
The Welsh team during the national anthems. Photo / Getty
The immediate post-war decades were a golden age for Wales, a time when their coal mines and car plants were at the heart of Britain's heavy industry.
Rugby was strongly tied to the national identity, the Welsh team being populated by a mix of tough men forged in the steel works and others who were blessed with the same creative traits that had many of their acting and singing peers in demand around the world.
Maybe Wales head back to the 1950s every time the All Blacks arrive because it was the last time they felt superior to New Zealand. It wasn't just a time when they could beat the All Blacks at rugby, it was a time when they had a greater sense of purpose and global standing.
A period when Wales could look at New Zealand and see many similarities but do so with a sense of contentment that they were building the deeper economic, cultural and social frameworks to sustain their rugby excellence.
Today there is perhaps just the one similarity which is that rugby continues to play an integral role in defining both nations and the test results allude to the wider changes both nations have experienced in the last 60-plus years which has seen New Zealand develop by far the bigger presence on the world stage and outgrow Wales in almost every conceivable way.
New Zealand has enjoyed a cultural, economic and political coming of age and from being the sleepy colonial dead spot that everyone used to joke was closed, it is now world-renowned as a destination for the adventurous and is the poster child of left-leaning Liberals everywhere.
The All Blacks, by having won 31 times consecutively since 1953, have exacerbated the feeling New Zealand is developing into the sort of nation Wales felt it was destined to become.
This desperation that Wales feel to beat the All Blacks again is understandable, but the more they cling to the past, the more unlikely they are to escape it.
